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As a parent, you might want to think twice about telling your kids about that pot you smoked in your errant youth or the time you got drunk at a friend’s party.

Rather than delivering the potent anti-drug message intended, baring your soul to your kids in that way can actually be harmful, according to a new academic study based on a survey of 561 kids from the U.S.

Rob Axsen, addictions clinical supervisor with the Surrey-based Pacific Community Resources Society, agrees for the most part with the findings published in the journal Human Communications Research.

Axsen said there is plenty of research to show that telling someone with a problem that you understand because you have been there yourself is almost always useless.

“I don’t think professionals or parents need to use that as their badge of honour,” said Axsen, responding to the study that surveyed 253 Latino and 308 European American students from the sixth to eighth grades.

“One of the stupidest things you can say is ‘I know where you have been because I have been there,’ because you were never where that person is at. You were where you were at.”

He has found that in many cases, a parent confiding past indiscriminate use of drugs or alcohol to their child can legitimize copycat action by the child, who will reason that if mom or dad turned out so well after such indiscretions, the same will probably be true for them.

Of course, there is always the situation where a child asks a parent directly about their past drug or alcohol use. What do you do then?

Axsen encountered this firsthand with his own two children, who are now in their early 30s. The question was logical, given his career as an addictions counsellor and what they had heard from others about their father, who had liver damage from drinking by the time he was 18.

“I gave them very minimal details because, to me, it’s irrelevant,” he said.

He feels that in most cases, it is far more beneficial for a parent to ask their child what they already know about drug and alcohol use, what they want to know and how you as a parent you can help them. Be as unemotional and factual as you can be, he advises.

There might be a tendency to believe that scaring the daylights out of kids by exposing them to harrowing accounts of near brushes with disaster through the use of some mind-bending substance will serve as a deterrent.

In today’s popular culture, some of the most highly rated speakers are those who tell all to an audience about their sordid pasts, supposedly to steer the unwary away from a life of debauchery of one sort or another.

Yet research shows such soul-baring confessions by parents or others rarely work as a deterrent, Axsen said.

While the stories are often riveting, the listeners tend to rationalize, suggesting to themselves that whoever is speaking has character flaws or a rough life that led them into the abyss, while they are much stronger and therefore immune to a similar fate.

It is far better, Axsen suggested, to discuss with kids why they would use drugs, to explore the short- and long-term risks, to explore what sort of limits should be put on risky behaviour and how they would help someone who is out of control.

Of course, there are always exceptions. Human behaviour and relationships are complex. Much depends, too, on the parent-child relationship and what kind of discussions they have had around other issues, he said.

And Dan Reist, assistant director at the Centre for Addictions Research of B.C. at the University of Victoria, cautions against drawing any definite conclusions from the small sample size in this study, given the complexity of the issue.

Reist said that while it is possible a parent could do more harm than good by exposing their past drug or alcohol use to their child, it is more important to focus on the principle that parents should discuss all sorts of things with their kids, encouraging them to think through the issues related to behaviour, substance use and what it means to be responsible human beings.

Exploring these issues with children will hone their abilities to be resilient and thoughtful, and to be connected with school, family and the community at large.

“That is what will protect them ultimately,” Reist said.

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Stories about your own drug use send the wrong message to kids, expert says

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